Touch-and-Go

Had a little time tonight so I did some daytime flying in nice weather for a change of pace. I decided to work on landings and the easiest way to do that is to fly touch-and-go patterns where you take off, circle the airport, land and then instead of slowing down and pulling off the runway, you go back to full throttle and take back off again to repeat the process.

Here's a nice shot of me flying the down-wind leg on one of the loops: As usual, I'm probably higher than I need to be and too close to the airport, but the clouds sure are pretty.

All three landings were successful - meaning that the airplane was still flyable afterwards. The middle landing was a little bouncy though. Need to work on that.

Here's another nice shot, especially of the clouds, showing me

crossing the end of the runway about to land:

A little later in the evening, I had a chance to fly again. Took off thinking of another touch-and-go, then decided to fly to Chattanooga, then changed my mind and decided to check out the mountains to the east. While approaching the mountains, I spotted another plane, which is rare because I have other aircraft traffic turned down very low. I wouldn't have seen it at all, but FSX flags other planes in the sky for you with their name, altitude and distance. I spotted that text long before the plane, but out of curiosity, I gained altitude and tried to intercept. The closest I got was about 1.1 miles away and about 3000 feet below him. Using the zoom function, I was able to see the actual plane and to get this image:

OK, not much to look at, but even at this resolution you can see a little dot below the red text. It was a Piper Cherokee 180 flying south at about 8400 feet.

And how about that daytime crescent moon?